Latest Posts

On the first day of the 2015 IDFA Forum (November 23 – 25) one of Europe's most important international co-financing and co-production markets for documentaries, an article appeared on the front page of IDFA's "Industry Special" newspaper entitled "Mind the (funding) gap." If filmmakers and industry had taken time out from the endless parade of Forum pitches, meetings and parties to read the piece, they might have packed their bags and headed home. In the piece, both Nick Fraser, editor of BBC Storyville, and Paul Pauwels, European Documentary Network (EDN) Director, express deep concern about

Essential Doc Reads is a weekly feature in which the IDA staff recommends recent pieces about the documentary form and its processes. Here we feature think pieces and important news items from around the Internet, and articles from the Documentary magazine archive. We hope you enjoy! The Huffington Post assesses the PR campaigns of universities like Harvard and Florida State against The Hunting Ground: If you haven't seen The Hunting Ground, but have only read about it, then you "know" that it is an "inaccurate", "misleading," "supposed documentary" forwarding the filmmakers' agenda. And you

For documentary filmmakers, strategists, funders, broadcasters, buyers—and of course, fans— November means the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), the premier international festival celebrating the best of the form from around the world. Along with more than 350 films and virtual reality projects on display, conversations about documentary’s societal impact were front and center. On the opening day of the festival and forum, Center for Media & Social Impact (CMSI) founder and senior research fellow Pat Aufderheide moderated a panel titled, "Evaluating Impact: Challenges and

The holidays are a time for bingeing on turkey and trimmings and — if Netflix gets its way —a new true-crime documentary series. The 10-part Making a Murderer, which premieres this Friday, December 18, on the streaming service, recalls In Cold Blood and, of course, HBO's The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst. Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos directed the series, which focuses on a small-town Wisconsin man, Steven Avery, who spent 18 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit. He got out, only to be later accused of an even more heinous crime—killing a woman at the family auto junkyard

It's the most wonderful time of the year: the time for publishing year-end lists! But we're not so interested in doing a "Best of 2015" list -- our own IDA Awards has that terrain well-covered. So instead, we turned to our colleagues here at IDA to weigh in on their most memorable moments of 2015. After much reflection and rumination, we've compiled the highlights from screenings, festivals, our own IDA programs, and community events to share with you, our community. While we couldn't include everything -- we would have a dissertation on our hands! -- we're happy to present the IDA staff's

Essential Doc Reads is a weekly feature in which the IDA staff recommends recent pieces about the documentary form and its processes. Here we feature think pieces and important news items from around the Internet, and articles from the Documentary magazine archive. We hope you enjoy! Wired previews the virtual reality projects at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival: It’s a long way away from the New Frontier program that launched a decade ago, back when the programming was a mix of experimental standard films and pieces that were more like art installations. Chris Milk, who has since become one of

When Tony Tabatznik founded the Bertha Foundation in 2009, he felt strongly that if you could connect storytellers, lawyers and activists, you have a formidable team for fighting for social change. After attending the Sundance Film Festival for several years, Tabatznik embraced the nonfiction media landscape as a major means to effect that change. In its brief life, the Bertha Foundation—through the Bertha Film Fund, the Bertha BRITDOC Connect Fund, the Bertha BRITDOC Documentary Journalism Fund and the IDFA Bertha Fund—has helped countless documentaries from around the world get made, get

Essential Doc Reads is a weekly feature in which the IDA staff recommends recent pieces about the documentary form and its processes. Here we feature think pieces and important news items from around the Internet, and articles from the Documentary magazine archive. We hope you enjoy! From CNN, filmmaker Roger Ross Williams on the making of his doc Blackface, about a troubling holiday tradition in The Netherlands, his adopted country: When I decided to make Blackface, a short film about Black Pete [a character in black face who gives candy to children during Sinterklaas, the most popular Dutch

Louie Psihoyos started his career as a photographer with an eye towards social change. He came to see that he could be even more effective as a filmmaker and made a major impact with his 2009 Academy Award-winning film, The Cove. He and his partners are back with a film designed to make people think deeply about the fact that our planet is racing towards a mass extinction. He was kind enough to take time out to thoughtfully answer our questions about craft and action. As the world’s leaders converge in Paris for the United Nations Conference on Climate Change, Racing Extinction hits the

IDFA’s DocLab conference and exhibit, coordinated by Caspar Sonnen, intersects with IDFA’s cornucopia of international documentary only occasionally. Instead, the DocLab is where you go to look at the edge of technical experiment in storytelling. This year we looked over the edge, into virtual reality—the lunchbox-on-the-face experience that wants to be the next big thing. A Future in Non-linear Storytelling How far we are away from the next big thing was hinted at by Google VR filmmaker Jessica Brillart. In her keynote, she challenged the audience to think about VR experience more in terms of